ABSTRACT
In this chapter I want to try to think through some of the implications of mass travel and tourism for the forms of social identity by which people organise and live their day-to-day lives. This is clearly a different concern from the standard impact studies on the one hand and the debates about tourism and international understanding on the other. I want to relate travel and tourism much more generally to the changing forms of culture that characterise contemporary society. Indeed I want to suggest first, that travel and tourism are extremely significant features of the modern world; and second, that current debates about the changing nature of ‘Europe’ cannot be undertaken without relating them to possible transformations of social identity that mass mobility brings about. This chapter is unashamedly conceptual and presents little empirical information.
